It really makes me wonder why lithium isn't naturopathic.
Well, it is.
Lithium Orotate is something you can buy in a health food store. It's unregulated.
Lithium Carbonate is what you get from a doctor.
I'm not enough of a chemist to really explain this - basically, the Orotate form uses one kind of ion to 'carry' the Lithium, and the Carbonate is using another.
Why is it regulated, then?
Well, it's been in medical use since the 1800s, for various conditions. Lithium salt even became a popular replacement for table salt in the 1930s/40s, for people trying to reduce sodium intake - that's how it was discovered to be toxic at high levels. So, no more of that. It was also an ingredient in early soft drinks (7up, just as coca-cola had cocaine).
In the late 1940s, an Australian doctor started using it to help patients with mania. There was much to figure out, about what levels were toxic, how to monitor it, etc. The Carbonate form was the cheapest to produce; no-one has ever gotten rich off of lithium because of a patent. There's nothing to patent, really.
Today's lithium most commonly prescribed is carbonate, followed by lithium citrate. Orotate has not really been studied sufficiently, in terms of whether it offers substantive benefits over those two. Lithium bromide and chloride were the ones sold as table salt, and no-one has gone back to the idea because of the toxicity issues. No real research on the medical application for lithium fluoride and iodide, under the assumption that they'd have the same problem.
Why not just get it over the counter?
The FDA is not wholly evil. You have some reason to believe, when you pick up your prescription lithium, that you are getting the actual mineral you are buying.
When you buy it as a supplement, without a prescription - you have no guarantee whatsoever.
See how much this all has in common with medical marijuana? The notion right now is that when you go to a dispensary, you have some amount of confidence that you are getting the plant prepared in a certain way - vs getting it from a dealer, where it may not be as promised.
The problem with the 'naturopathy' concept is that natural does not equal safe; nor does it equal reliable. Nature is chemicals. Everything is chemicals.
There's a lab that pretty much does nothing except cannabis research, and they believe they have found a way to isolate CBD in a controlled, repeatable, lab-based manner. This is great - because CBD is the non-psychotropic component of the marijuana plant, the one that won't accidentally start a psychosis. It's the compound that our bodies are primed to react to. It's actually what most people want out of their medical MJ - the 'high' is just the byproduct from other compounds, specifically THC. THC is potentially useful also as a psychotropic in its own right, for the treatment of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Isolating all the parts of the cannabis plant - known as 'cannabinoids' - will allow this plant/drug to become infinitely safer and more reliable than it currently is. Just as Lithium went from being something found in natural springs that helped with gout to one of the most dependable psychotropic medications on the market.
Sorry - I get a bit on the soapbox about what 'natural' and 'naturopathic' really mean. In my opinion, that's simply another kind of marketing scheme for a different kind of drug-selling.
It's a true thing that the nearer a substance is to being part of the organic human system - the more potent it is likely to be. Our bodies require certain minerals; we all consume trace amounts of lithium regularity. It's in non-processed food. It's in water. We also have physical receptors specifically for cannabinoids. We make certain kinds of cannabinoids inside our wn bodies. It's not surprising that the plant has many applications for the aid/treatment of the human body, in various ways.
Drugs that are purely synthetic - that work to create replicas of organic compounds - are often simply not as effective. So, when people talk about the benefits of 'natural' vs 'drugs'.....what I think they mean is more like the difference between eating 'whole foods' (i.e. a bare minimum of processing) vs 'processed food' (things that call themselves food but might have very little whole food present, or unadulterated).
They are both good. Either one can provide calories and minerals and nutrients - but one is closer to a primary source of nutrition, and the other, isn't. And they exist on a spectrum. There's chicken breast from a chicken that has lived a drug-free life, then there's enhanced chicken breast, then there's pre-cooked and preserved chicken with breast meat, chicken deli meat, and somewhere way down the line, things sold as 'chicken strips' that may contain parts from all over the chicken carcass, that have been processed, retexturized, dyed, chicken-flavored, and shaped to look like chicken.
All substances that we use to affect our health - they all fall somewhere on that spectrum of natural to synthetic. But it's got more to do with what's in it, and less to do with what form it's coming to you in. Natural is not innately better; and 'drugs' regulated by the FDA are not necessarily highly synthetic.
/end soapbox
